Be forever on the guard - SONY's Playstation Network has been online filtrated

Last week SONY's Playstation Network was infiltrated, which meant that 77 mio customers accounts with personal information were stolen - making it one of the biggest online data infiltrations ever.

Learning about this made me quite aware of how internet and personal data do not really go hand in hand.
The hackers can use the information they got from SONY (fx people's birthdays and adresses) to go 'spearphishing'. Spearphishing are "attacks" on often individuals that are customized to each individual target. Hackers draft emails that will maybe appear to come from someone the individual knows (fx a boss) or a trusted company, also it wil often contain enough personal information to persuade the victim to let down its defenses - which then can lead to people withdrawing money from their bank accounts or downloading malicious software.

People are getting less trusty of the internet, and do not just click whatever link drops into their mail inbox. BUT when hackers from SONY have a lot of information on people like fx birthdays and phonenumbers it becomes less transparent for the individual.

A test made by searchsecurity showed that a man pretending to be a 'colonal of West Point' could trick 80 % of 500 cadets into clicking link solely because they trusted this authority.

Many speculate that spear phishing will increase. Spam filters might get better, but the spammers ak the time adopt "sophisticated" spear phishing techniques in order to reach their victims. Also people are not so careful with their personal information in their increasing use of social networks. Another reason allspammedup.com writes, is that many companies do not come clean on their data breaches. A wealth of stolen information is floating around out there.
Reuters writes that reasons for companies not to report this can be that they either do not know that they have been hacked or that they want to avoid the public embarresment and the public scrutiny.

It seems then that we forever have to be careful of these 'spearphishers'. PC mag offers a list of things one can do to avoid being a victim of spearphishing. Click the link to see this list.

I guess we have to be forever on the watch, and never let our guards down. Even trusted companies like SONY can be hacked - and even though they will develop better technologies to secure their customer's informations, this seems to be no guarantee. We could avoid giving informations ti fx companies like SONY, but this is probably not the future.